Midwest

These days investing in the stock market is not for the faint of heart, and in markets from coast to coast thousands of developer-owned condos now sit vacant. But when it comes to land, there’s no shortage of motivated buyers. That’s the takeaway…

One of the leading stories of 2008 has been skyrocketing commodity prices and the corresponding surge in land values throughout the Midwest, Great Plains, Southwest, and other mineral-rich areas of the country. Although the bubble has by no means burst, there…

In the midst of a mounting avalanche of bad economic news, I thought it worth singling out one company with strong ties to the land that continues to shine. Earlier this month, Caterpillar announced that it was paying a quarterly dividend…

Driving today I tuned into C-SPAN Radio on my XM dial looking for something better than the latest Top 20. I caught the tail end of a conversation, Congressional testimony it sounded like, regarding the current food crisis that is…

Corn revenues could easily surpass $40 billion in the United States this year as farmers rush to take advantage of rising interest in ethanol, according to a recent report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Farmland values in Illinois increased by nearly 6 percent during the first half of this year with investors, both local and national, bidding up the rural properties, particularly in the “collar counties” around Chicago. Rather than focus on short-term problems in…

Amazing new diets, intriguing self-help books, a daily dose of St. John’s Wort – we are a country obsessed with quick fixes. Now, as Time points out in this cover story titled The Clean Energy Myth, we can add ethanol…

It’s official. The New York Times proclaimed in August that the market for Midwestern farmland was “hot,” a declaration akin to labeling Hurricane Katrina “dangerous” two weeks after it devastated the Gulf Coast. Anyone remotely familiar with the Corn Belt…

BY JOSEPH GUINTO PUBLISHED APRIL 2007 With the Bush administration backing off on the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), conservation and hunting groups fear the 22-year-old program once dubbed “Noah’s Arc for Wildlife” is a sinking ship. Backers of the CRP,…